The Pipeline Notes · 8 November 2026
Why your leads aren't bad, your handoff is
Original summary by Sina Dadmehr. This is not a republication of the LinkedIn issue.
The first issue of The Pipeline Notes treats “the leads are bad” as a handoff complaint more often than a media complaint. Marketing can show a fresh set of enquiries while sales has spoken to only some of them, and nobody has written down why the rest were rejected. Changing the campaign, the agency or the targeting does not repair a gap that sits after the form.
Sina names seven places that gap usually appears. A buyer may already be comparing competitors if the first personal reply is measured in days rather than a working hour. A shared inbox can receive a request without anyone owning it. Sales may get a name and an email, then spend time reconstructing the company, the role and the source. Ad platforms keep learning from form fills when qualified outcomes never travel back. Marketing and sales can both be “right” because they use different definitions of a lead. Without a written service-level agreement, a Friday enquiry can stall. And if “bad” has no required reason, the same audience gets bought again.
The week’s exercise is a 15-minute pass over the last 20 inbound leads. For each one, check the hours to a personal reply, whether a named owner was assigned within an hour, whether company, role and source were already on the record, how many contact attempts were made, whether the status or disqualification reason is clear, and whether that outcome went back to Google Ads or LinkedIn Ads. If fewer than half of the 20 pass all six checks, the next euro may belong in the handoff rather than in more ad spend.
Three things to take back
- A slow or ownerless follow-up can look like a lead-quality problem.
- Put one written definition and a reply-time target in the CRM, not only in a slide.
- Send qualified outcomes back to the ad platforms so they stop learning only from form fills.
Read the full issue on LinkedIn